


Do not go gentle into that goodnight

by BlueMoonHound



Series: no halo [8]
Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Head Injury, Immortality, Memory Loss, Trauma, hurt/comfort (???), necromancy cults, no halo universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-05
Updated: 2018-04-05
Packaged: 2019-04-18 15:36:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,617
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14216316
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlueMoonHound/pseuds/BlueMoonHound
Summary: She wakes up with her face pressed into a mess of spruce needles. Her first thought is that she must have fallen out of the tree above her. She must have, because that would explain how much she aches all over.Her second thought isWho am I?





	1. Do Not go Gentle into that Goodnight

**Author's Note:**

> set before the last scene in the epilouge of No Halo but after the rest of the work.

She wakes up with her face pressed into a mess of spruce needles. Her first thought is that she must have fallen out of the tree above her. She must have, because that would explain how much she aches all over.

Her second thought is _Who am I_?

In the grand scheme of things, though, she supposes that doesn't matter. She knows that sometimes people just forget everything and she knows that's unnatural but she also knows that worrying about it just makes it harder to deal with.

She takes stock. Her head hurts. It hurts a lot, and it's hurting more with the passing seconds, which is unpleasant. She grimaces. She moves her hand into her view. It's old looking and dark. The nails look like they were painted violet but all the paint is chipping off. She runs it over her head, face, hair, wincing when she touches a sore spot, and comes back with red on her fingers. That's no good. She knows she's human, though, now, which means she can't be more than a hundred years old. In fact, probably not more than sixty. But shes not a humanologist. Or whatever that's called. She has no idea if she is or not. She has to assume that she's not, though, for now, because it doesn't help her that she might be.

Despite her best efforts, figuring out this information does nothing to help her figure out who she is. She can't even produce a name. She clearly knows a language, though, at least one. No, at least two. Interesting. She licks her lips and tries saying something in the other one. It's old, and it's not a language she uses anymore. But it's the most her of any language she's ever spoken. She rolls this information around in her brain. First language? She supposes it would make sense for that to stick with her.

“ _Ciao_ ,” she rasps. Oh gods, that hurts.

There's no one to greet anyway.

She gives up on language for a little while. Too much work.

It really bothers her. She has to know more languages than this. She remembers knowing more languages but she can't even remember the names of the languages she can actually recall. She's probably missing some words, in the one she defaults to. No, she's definitely missing some words. Trying to figure out if she knows languages is not helping her not be lying in the dirt suffering from memory loss.

She tries pushing herself onto hands and knees, simultaneously regretting and being thankful of the action: She falls back to the ground again almost immediately, writhing with pain, but she also spies that she has a travelling pack attached to her hip, which means she might have a method of communication. Or, at least, something that might tell her who she is, but she's given up a little on that. A heavy blue necklace slides from her shoulder to the ground, about the same time. She stares at it, eyes just inches away, and then lifts it in one palm, still trying to shake the dizziness from her attempt to sit up. It glows to life in her hand.

This is. It's. She can't remember what it's called. But it's definitely used for communication. She can't remember how to dial, or anything, so she just tries speaking again.

“Emergency.”

It seems to work. It hurts, more than her earlier mumbled greeting, but this time at least it's being put toward a goal. And the stone flickers again, a little light in it spinning. She waits.

A voice comes through. “Nyello, this is the emergency call line, you've reached the bureau of benevolance.”

They sound bored. She almost laughs.

“Hi.”

“Hey. What's the issue?”

“I don't know.”

“Listen I've had a very long day and I'm not reeeaaaally in the mood for prank calls.”

“Okay.” She licks her lips. What's a prank call? Is she doing one? Is that what this is? “My head hurts.”

“We don't do headaches. We do search and rescue, mdude.”

“I don't know where I am.”

“At all? Can you give me an idea here.”

“A. Spruce tree? I don't know. I can't see very well.”

“What were you doing before you ended up under a spruce tree, dingus?”

“I don't remember.”

“Okay, what's your name, then? We can find someone to help ya out based on where you should be.”

“I don't remember that either. Sorry.”

Whoever it is pauses for a long moment. Their pen stops scratching.

“Hokay, what do you remember?”

“Two languages? One of them is old. And. I don't think people know it. And I'm human, but I didn't remember that. I touched my face. I'm old. Not very old, though, because I'm human, so I must not be more than a century old--”

“Can you remember anything that can actually help us figure out where the fuck you're at.”

“Probably not.”

“This sounds a lot like a prank call. Tee Bee ache I haven't hung up just because you sound like a friend.”

“My voice is friendly? It hurts.”

“It hurts?”

“To talk.”

“Ah. Hm.” Another pause, this one shorter. She feels like she's going to fall asleep. “Hold on a fuckin second. I can trace your farspeech signal. Do you know what it is?”

“Uh.”

“Look on the back of your stone. Can you read?”

She turns the stone over. There are seven digits engraved on the back. “Y-Yes.”

“Read those to me.”

She reads the digits to the person on the other side of the line.

“Fuck, shit, that's--” They cut out for a moment. “Did you read that right?”

“Yes.” She repeats the numbers.

“You have my friend's stone of farspeech.”

“Really?”

“Yeahhhh. We're coming, okay? Hang tight.”

“Oh.” She says. “Okay.” She hears the stone click off and stops struggling to hold her head an inch above the ground. Even from that tiny height, the impact hurts. She struggles for consciousness. Consciousness is necessary right now, she thinks. At least till the people get here.

There's a spruce cone sticking into her ribs somewhere.

Her legs are numb.

She breathes, in and out. She has to keep breathing.

She knows, logically, that she has legs. Humans have legs. She's human. These are all conclusions she has reached.

The pain in her head continues to build along the base of her neck. It's uncomfortable. She supposes this situation wasn't meant to come with comfort.

She gets a memory and grasps onto it. It's not much. A snippet of a fragment of a scene in which she draws someone else's hand in a well-worn notebook. She's a child, she thinks, in that memory. It must have happened a long time ago. Well, not an endlessly long time, since she's human. She's not sure why time feels so short and irrelevant to her, since she _is_ human. Shouldn't it be long and stretched out in her mind? Long enough to fit her entire, probably sixty year lifespan?

Maybe she's one of those recessive half-elves who has all the human traits that their parents human parents had for ear shape and things but also many of the elf traits like long life. Maybe she has been alive for seven hundred years.

It doesn't feel right, though. Human feels right, even if the time feels wrong for it.

At that moment, a rift in timespace forms itself in the air. She flinches, her heart suddenly hammering. Who--

“Oh istus,” She hears, and it's that voice again, the one from the stone. An elf (? She's not been good with specieses in the past… while) kneels down in front of her. “Can you hear me?”

“Ciao,” she tries again.

“Ciao, gods, okay, don't look at me like that, you know I have an accent.” The elf lifts her up into their arms and she writhes. The pain in her head intensifies til the space in front of her eyes is entirely white.

She moans in pain.

“Oh fuck, shit, sorry,” they say, adjusting just a little. The world goes wonderfully, blessedly still. She can see again.

The elf is a fairly regular looking sun elf, wearing a crinkly glamour on their face. She wants to poke it, just a little.

“Barry, can you get Merle?” The elf says, still looking at her face.

“Ye-eah, I'll uh, be right back,” another voice says. She doesn't bother trying to look, it seems like a bad idea. Another rift opens, she can feel it, but then it's gone, and so is the other person. Barry. The name feels familiar in her mind.

“Who are you?” She asks the person.

“Oh I'm,” they giggle unhappily. “I'm Taako. You know. From TV?”

“What's TV?”

“Travelling – You know what, nevermind.”

“Okay.”

Her eyes begin to drift shut.

Taako shakes her. “Lucretia, you have to stay awake. Can you stay awake?”

He eyes snap open. “Am I bleeding?”

“yeah.”

A pause.

“My name's Lucretia?”

“Yeah it is.”

“Huh.” She licks her lips. “Lucretia. I'm Lucretia.” She blinks at Taako. “Why didn't you tell me before?”

“Oh, uh, Iunno,” Taako says. “Uh. Is Italian easier right now? Because we don't gotta talk in common. You taught me.”

“What's Italian?”

“Oh shit, okay, that's – I'm sorry, Lucy, but that's pretty fucking funny.” He seems to be holding back laughter. She doesn't quite understand what the fuck is going on.

“Do I have legs?”

“What?” Taako stops smiling. “Yeah of course you have legs, why do you ask?”

“Just can't tell.”

“You're loopy as fuck, babe.”

“Yeah.”

“You're also getting blood on my shirt.”

“Sorry.”

“don't worry about it.”  
“Okay.”

Another rift opens, and Lucretia flinches. Rifts are bad. Two people step through the rift this time, and this time she can see them – a human and a dwarf. Well, the human is a skeleton for a second, but his skin grows back over his bones, into a stout man in jeans. The dwarf walks past him and over to Lucretia, kneeling down next to her.

“When did you wake up?”

“What?”

“How long ago?”

“I don't know.”

The dwarf looks in her eyes. Messes with the wound at the side of her head. She whines.

“Okay, I can fix this, but the amnesia is gonna have to go away on its own.” He presses two fingers to her temple and healing magic pulses through her, chasing the pain away. She sighs, her vision clearing and the fog in her mind lifting just enough that she can make some calculations about her situation.

“How am I human if it's also irrefutable fact that I'm several hundred years old?” Lucretia asks.

“Don't worry about it,” Taako says, sitting her up. The pain in her legs smashes into her as soon as she moves and she whimpers.

“Unless you want permanently deformed bones we're gonna have to go somewhere with better equipment to fix these,” Merle says. “Your left leg is broken in three places. Fuck, did you fall out of the tree or something? What the hell were you doing?”

“I don't remember.”

“No, of course not. Only one break in the right one. Okay. Not the end of the world. Anything else feel broken?”

Lucretia flexes her fingers, rolls her head from side to side. “No?” There's a little ache in her ribs, but she's pretty sure nothing there is actually broken. She must have had broken ribs before, because she's acutely aware of what that would feel like.

“Okay, I'm gonna splint these. Hang tight.”

Lucretia tries to focus more on Taako's collarbone than on whatever Merle's doing with her legs. It doesn't exactly work, pain is much more intense than Taako's shirt is interesting. She ends up biting her lip instead, forehead connecting with his shoulder.

“Also I think you're gonna have to get someone alive to heal the rest of this,” Merle says as Taako picks her up, obviously using mostly magic to lift her from the ground. “Ghost rules.”  
Barry turns into a skeleton again.

“You're just tryina get outta healing, old man,” Taako says.

“Yeah, maybe,” Merle chuckles.

Barry cuts a rift. Lucretia flinches. She clings to Taako's neck as they step through it. She's not even entirely sure why rifts are so terrifying.

Someone's shifting her around again, though, moments later, and for some reason she's amazed that she isn't falling. Lying down is fine, though. Lying down is good. She wants to sleep again, but Taako presses long fingers to her her face and begs her to stay present just a little longer. Barry and Merle are gone.

“Is Merle dead?”

“You were at his funeral, kemosabe,” Taako says.

“Oh.” She vaguely remembers Merle's funeral, all of a sudden. She talked to Pan. He gave her wine. How odd. “Oh. I think I remember that.”

Another person walks in a few minutes later and messes with her legs again, which is very much still painful. Taako lets her grip his hand, maybe a little too tightly. And then, they're healed. Lucretia sighs.

It's been a very long day, she decides, even though she's not sure what happened for most of it. She's drifting off despite herself, despite knowing her clothes are still covered in tree sap and there's blood in at very least her hair. Taako keeps running her hand through her curls, which is very soothing.

She drifts off.


	2. Rage, rage against the dying of the light

The easiest and fastest way to kidnap the most powerful abjurer in the universe is definitely to knock her out in one blow, drag her to an unidentifiable cave, and tie her to a wall.

That doesn't by any means indicate that she'll be happy when she wakes up.

Lucretia groans, her vision swimming. Whatever they hit her with, they sure hit her hard. She didn't even get a good look at her attacker before she ate pavement, that time. Granted, she's only been kidnapped a few times now, most of them in the century, but being kidnapped is the most unnerving when you can't even tell what's happening before it happens.

Usually, though, especially now, Lucretia can escape easily. She's very good at getting away from bad situations mostly scot-free. Even when it comes to tackling antimagic wards – there is definitely an antimagic ward on her – she's good at this. Practice makes proficient or whatever.

First thing she does is figure out exactly what kind of ward it is, and where it's located. Her hands are bound, and it feels like it might be the handcuffs themselves which are blocking magic – clever. She checks herself over for injuries while she's at it. A dull throbbing in a few spots on her forearms. They've probably taken her blood. A headache, probably a concussion by the way the world swirls together when she moves her eyes. Okay. Could be worse, she considers.

It's always disgusting, but the next step is to carefully wiggle her gag out of her mouth. She spits a wad of fabric on the floor. Good thing they're lazy.

She's not going to be able to get herself free, but at least now she can distract them by being quietly vocal. They seem to be muttering over a book together. Some kind of journal, though from this angle it doesn't appear to be her own. Thank goodness. The more dead the world thinks she is, the more complicated reclaiming stolen notebooks becomes.

She resists the urge to shake her head and blinks a few times. Action time.

“What'cha working on?” Lucretia asks, as calmly as she can muster. Her words slur together just a little, which is just a little more than she would like them to.

They all look up, one of them turns around.

“She's awake.”

“Should I--”

“No, give me a moment.” One of the members of the (cult? Group? Are they necromancers? Probably) walks over to where she's bound and sticks a wand in her face. “How have you lived so long?”

“That's a good question,” Lucretia says, trying to maintain the facade of control.

“You really don't know?”  
“You've taken away my magic and you have me tied to a wall. I would tell you if I knew.” The trick is to sound convincing. She doesn't actually know that she would tell them if she knew the secret to her longevity, but she's not going to tell them that. She doesn't actually know what they plan on doing with her when they're done with… whatever spell they're working on. They have her blood, they don't exactly need her there.

She starts devoting about half her focus to the magic wards. They aren't the most complicated locks she's ever had to break, but they certainly are the most complicated she's had to break in the heat of a moment while sporting a headache. Her focus is also a little preoccupied, for a moment more, with the cultist regarding her, though soon they turn away and she is left to her own devices.

It takes her about fifteen minutes to click the lock open. She sighs with relief as magic floods under her skin again, waiting for her orders. It's easy to wriggle herself free of the ropes with magic, and she slips to the floor as quietly as she can manage, which it turns out isn't very quietly, because she falls forward onto her hands and knees, the handcuffs skittering noisily across the floor.

The cultists swing around again. Someone shouts. Lucretia tries to get to her feet, but someone grabs her by the neck and slams her head back into the wall. The world spins. Someone is talking, and a few seconds pass in blissful stillness-- and then she's thrown through a rift dripping with necrotic energy, and she falls.

At some point, she passes a treeline. She hits her head again, on a branch. She thinks it must be a branch, in the few fleeting seconds she remains conscious.

The world returns to darkness.

 

* * *

 

She wakes up alone. Alone, in a bed in the Bureau's infirmary. She has a little bit of a headache, but nothing over-the-counter pain medication couldn't fix. Her ribs ache. Lucretia pushes herself up on her elbows and pours herself a glass of water from the pitcher by her left arm. Water is – Gods, water is wonderful, she swallows down two whole glasses of the stuff before slowing down.

She's still missing large swaths of time, but she's aware of them, now. Cycles forty-seven through seventy are missing. That area of her memory fizzles out at the edges, so the surrounding cycles are also choppy. There's something painful about that specific hole. It's the biggest one.

She can remember what happened before she woke up on the forest floor, though, now. She sips her water and rolls it around in her head.

It takes about twenty minutes for anyone to come check on her. At first, it's a doctor, who pokes and prods and decides she's doing fine. She settles back in her pillows with a huff. She shouldn't be lounging around when there's work to do, but she wants to talk to one of the IPRE members before she just…. Gets back to the everyday.

Also, she's almost definitely disgusting right now. If she remembers correctly, there's blood in her hair. That's going to take forever to fix. She can't muster the energy to drag herself to the showers, though, either. She grimaces at her cup. Good riddance.

Lup comes in next, carrying a book and looking a little put off. She perks up when she realizes Lucretia is awake.

“Hey, Lucy!” She grins, her ears lifting a little. Lucretia offers her a wan smile.

Lup sits down on her bed. “How ya feeling?”

Lucretia shrugs.

Lup chews her lip.

“They wanted to find the key to immortality. People are starting to realize that I'm immortal.” Lucretia shrugs. “It's been. Three hundred years, almost, since story and song? I'm not alive anymore, not to most.”

“Course not, babe, you're human.”

“Obviously I am not human anymore. I haven't aged since I was in my thirties.” She swallows. “Discounting wonderland.” She wonders what that means, in the end. What is she if she's not human? She knows some elves outlive the average lifespan for their race, but that's usually due to some magical influence, whether from a god or from some earthly being they serve-- it's most common in wood elves, anyway. Humans, though, humans are inherently nonmagic. They can't get that sort of assist, not without – well – she's not sure.

“Mmm.” Lup shifts. “How's your head?”

“Better, I think.” Lucretia sighs. “I don't think they did any lasting damage. I'm not actually sure it's possible to do lasting damage to me, as I am right now.”

“Naw?”

“No.” Lucretia grabs Lup and drags her to the head of the bed. “Come here, you're soft.”

“Softer than pillows?”

“More worthwhile for head-resting than pillows.” She breathes in the scent of Lup's deodorant. “Besides, I have to get back to work soon. Give me this.”

“Nope,” Lup says, even though she's lifted up the bedsheets and climbed under.

“What?” Lucretia snorts.

“You're not getting back to work. Doc's orders.”

“Merle doesn't have the privilege to boss me around.”

“Ha. You're staying put, Lucy.”

“Fuck you.”

“Rest first.”

Lucretia sighs. However worrying the cultists may be, she's sure the other reapers can take care of it. She swallows and lists off all the reasons it makes sense for her to rest: her head is throbbing, her legs hurt, Lup wants her to. She doesn't have any urgent paperwork to file. She's safe and comfortable.

 _Okay_ , Lucretia decides. _I can rest._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We inch slowly closer to answering the question of Lucretia's nature.


End file.
